Campaigners warn reforms fail to tackle the “dark corners of the internet” where paedophiles share images away from public search engines

Google and Microsoft will be introducing new software to automatically block 100,000 “unambiguous” search terms

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A crackdown by Microsoft and Google on internet searches for child abuse images will not stop paedophiles using the web to share horrific photos and videos, campaigners have warned.

Ahead of a Downing Street summit today, the internet giants announced they will be introducing new software to automatically block 100,000 “unambiguous” search terms which lead to illegal content.

The Prime Minister hailed the decision as “significant progress” after the companies insisted it “couldn’t be done, shouldn’t be done”.

But child protection campaigners warned the reforms fail to tackle the “dark corners of the internet” where paedophiles share images away from the public search engines.

Former Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) chief executive Jim Gamble told BBC’s Breakfast programme: “I don’t think this will make any difference with regard to protecting children from paedophiles.

“They don’t go on to Google to search for images.

“They go on to the dark corners of the internet on peer-to-peer websites.”

The restrictions will be launched in the UK first, before being expanded to other English-speaking countries and 158 other languages in the next six months.

A further 13,000 search terms linked with child sex abuse will flash up warnings from Google and charities that the content could be illegal and pointing them towards help.

“But the Government’s right that our industry can do more. So we’ve developed new technology to detect and remove videos of abuse, we are showing warnings against search terms related to child sexual abuse, and we are fine tuning our search engine to prevent this material appearing in our results.

“We hope this will make difference in the fight against this terrible crime.”

Google’s new technology will be able to remove up to thousands of copies of an illegal video in one hit. When a child abuse video is discovered, the software can attach a unique code to it which can remove all copies from the web.

The system is designed to identify new code words or terms paedophiles start to use and can block search results for these too.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told the Daily Mail his company has been working with Microsoft, which owns the Bing search engine, and law enforcement agencies since the summer following strong warnings from the Government to take action.

“While no algorithm (instructions for software) is perfect - and Google cannot prevent paedophiles adding new images to the web - these changes have cleared up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids,” he said.

Claire Perry, the Prime Minister’s adviser on preventing sexualisation of children, insisted that the change was a “massive step forward” but the Government was not “declaring victory”.

The Tory MP said the next step was to tackle sharing of abuse pictures on the “deep” internet, using methods such as peer-to-peer networks.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We are driving people out of the public internet, which is a good thing. People can’t find these images so they are privately going into the deep internet and that is where we need to be.”